17 ms·

It's time to make computing personal again

• spencerflem 2y ago
  This is part of why I've been so excited about Genode/Sculpt https://genode.org/documentation/articles/sculpt-24-10 https://genode.org/documentation/articles/sculpt-24-10 It's tiny, clearly built with love for the user, doesn't do a heck of a lot, and has some interesting ideas that are just fun to mess around in. And unlike some of the similar retrocomputing OS's (which are also lovely but grounded in old fashioned design), genode feels like a glimpse into the good future.
  • abrookewood 2y ago
    That looks like the most radical/unusual operating system thing I have seen in recent memory. Not sure how practical it is, but kudos for trying something so different.
    • spencerflem 2y ago
      It's so cool, I could talk about it forever. It's practical enough for the devs to use it as a daily driver (though with linux in VirtualBox or Seoul for some things like running their builds) and theres a few businesses built on it. But nowhere near as practical as Linux at the moment of course
      • tombert 2y ago
        Interesting, I didn't know anyone had tried to make seL4 on a desktop. I think it'd be very cool to have a fully verified kernel...
  • portercable 2y ago
    I had not heard of Genode/Sculpt, but it looks interesting. These days, I feel like if I boot a new operating system, I have no idea what all it's doing and whether or not things are secure--I'm basically relying on the operating system to have good defaults. And then it's so easy to screw something up! I like the idea of Qubes and it looks like Genode might be an even better idea...
    • spencerflem 2y ago
      It's a very similar philosophy to Qubes - one of their open challenges is to port the qubes infrastructure over since qubes is (in theory at least) hypervisor independent. https://genode.org/about/challenges https://genode.org/about/challenges Which would be nice since NOVA hypervisor is dramatically less code then Xen and Nitpicker/Dialog for the management console is dramatically less code than Fedora. I've looked into it briefly but it seems like too much work for me right now. The True Genode Way of course is that everything worth having would eventually be ported as a native genode component instead of a qubes style VM. They've put a lot of effort into making that as easy as they can with Goa (a nix-inspired package management and build tool) and adding to their C standard library and ports of popular 3rd party libs like SDL
    • spencerflem 2y ago
      Also - their defaults are pretty hilarious. They dont assume you want a RAM-Only filesystem. By default it starts out completely immutable with nothing being able to save anything anywhere. If you want to save anything to a hard drive you have to enable that driver because they don't assume that you'd need one. Copy and paste is an optional extra to install It's wild :p
  • latentcall 2y ago
    Wow, this looks really cool. How does it handle Atheros WiFi cards? I have a ThinkPad X200 I’d love to throw this on for fun. Thanks for sharing!!
    • spencerflem 2y ago
      Not sure! They have a system set up for porting drivers from Linux into userspace components so it bats above its size. From their description: "It is tested best on laptops of the Lenovo X and T series (X220, X250, X260, T430, T460, T470, T490)", 200 isn't on the list but you'd probably have about as good a time as you can
• xnx 2y ago
  There's plenty of Ed Zitron's opinions I don't agree with, but this is a really good quote: "Our economy isn’t one that produces things to be used, but things that increase usage."
  • x-complexity 2y ago
    > "Our economy isn’t one that produces things to be used, but things that increase usage." ...the quote, *AS A SOUNDBITE*, only sounds good on a surface level, but collapses under the slightest test. All products in some form or another increase the usage of resources in order to reach a certain goal. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-anti-economy/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-anti-economy/ The article, where the quote originates from, contextualizes the quote marking (a) the difference between products in service of an actual goal, (b) products that are only meant to look good on a balance sheet, and (c) how companies have morphed towards (b) in order to attract investor funds and increase share prices / company market values. The quote, BY ITSELF AND WITHOUT CONTEXT, is a twisted Neo-luddist version of its original self.
    • johnnyanmac 2y ago
      I think a more generous interpretation of this is simply one that is critiquing planned obsolescence and addicting algorithm. Some things need to increase usage by nature, but how many services have you used that really needed a subscription as a necessary model to work?
      • XorNot 2y ago
        My hot take is planned obsolescence doesn't exist. It's a side effect of items being built to cost, and the marketing phenomenon that consumers follow fashion trends. Your car doesn't have planned obsolescence: it has a warranty period. If you want a longer one, you'll pay more because that is not a free service to provide.
        • plaguehammer 2y ago
          That’s a reductionist view. Have you read “Made to Break” by Giles Slade? A great book on this subject. Make no mistake, there’s a lot of deliberate planning and effort that goes into designing things to break after a point in time, for nothing else but profit, the environment be damned.
• tylerflick 2y ago
  I would argue that computing has never been more personal if you’re willing to put in a little effort. The advent of containerization, miniaturization of PC’s, and overall drop in cost of technology has allowed anyone to run there own personal intranet, homelab, whatever.
  • wvenable 2y ago
    If you want to run your own little silo completely disconnected from your fellow human beings then it has never been easier. But that was never really all difficult in the first place. I don't think it's truly the problem that needs to be solved.
    • jazzyjackson 2y ago
      Buy-in from the community is indeed the hard part but I have friends running irc and phpbb we hang out in, and matrix is more or less viable to self host for a group chat, it’s just that 100x more people are using Discord and Signal because of network effects, your one account can give you access to a million communities. I guess activitypub and matrix are meant to be similar in that regard but for whatever reason the learning curve is just a little steeper, so you have to be motivated by ideology to put up with the gaps in usability
      • spencerflem 2y ago
        I really want to love matrix but as it stands right now discord is a lot more usable While im willing to out up with it, its a hard sell to get your friends to use something worse
      • johnnyanmac 2y ago
        Yeah, that network effect is always the hard part once you want/need to reach out past your personal circle. Even with a personal circle it can ha hard to make people use a better but smaller service.
      • BrenBarn 2y ago
        Matrix has some promise, but it's also essentially VC-funded despite the way they try to present it.
• _9y71 2y ago
  Also, looking at abandoned blogs and old photos of people lying next to their computers from the early 2000s is so interesting. It captures a time when people truly connected with their machines and made them part of their identity.
  • Fluorescence 2y ago
    Hmm - rather than identity, I suspect it was more of a marketing trope. I associate this genre of photo with the photo-shoots with Gates, Jobs and others. All the interviews and full page ads in the 80s 90s had variations of sitting/lying on desks, hugging CRT monitors or the classic folded-arms lean on a CRT from behind. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/dd/97/ed/dd97ed2a239c725ebe57e60b48499a66.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/dd/97/ed/dd97ed2a239c725ebe57... https://i.pinimg.com/originals/13/b1/3a/13b13a8c0bc7ee256b37f5d8c99af464.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/13/b1/3a/13b13a8c0bc7ee256b37... https://wolfsheadonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/Nolan-Bushnell-Atari.jpg https://wolfsheadonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/Nolan... https://alchetron.com/cdn/dan-bricklin-6a3581d7-0d8c-4413-910b-54042b8d684-resize-750.jpg https://alchetron.com/cdn/dan-bricklin-6a3581d7-0d8c-4413-91... I don't recall old-school blogs doing this or really having author photos at all (photos on that bandwidth/hosting?!) but I imagine whenever a blogger was interviewed for print media they would lean on the "computer person" standards.
• wvenable 2y ago
  I'm kinda disappointed the "How We Can Reclaim Control" part isn't a bit more prescriptive. I feel like retaining control on a scale that effects the average person is basically impossible.
  • musicale 2y ago
    I think he is recommending the following: - legalizing DRM circumvention (repealing DMCA section 1201) - comprehensive privacy legislation (US adopting GDPR+) - right to repair legislation. - antitrust action and enforcement against tech companies As he notes, these are currently non-starters because of legislative and regulatory capture. But even if they were implemented, laws and regulatory enforcement might not have the desired effect. Surveillance capitalism, adtech, and data brokers seem to be surprisingly GDPR-resistant, and California's CCPA seems to have had minimal effect. Right-to-repair is limited by miniaturization and component integration, and the result seems to be Apple's impractical and expensive repair kits. Antitrust seems to be ineffective (see IBM, Microsoft.) Even the DMA, carefully crafted to target Apple, Google, Meta et al. (and to extract billions from them for noncompliance) doesn't seem to be affecting the dominance of those companies just yet.
• MichaelZuo 2y ago
  What is the actual argument for why this new societal/technological/economic trajectory will occur…?
• beeflet 2y ago
  https://archive.ph/Tvksy https://archive.ph/Tvksy cause the page is getting hugged
• marbro 2y ago
  The author claims, "Internet surveillance, the algorithmic polarization of social media, predatory app stores, and extractive business models have eroded the freedoms the personal computer once promised, effectively ending the PC era for most tech consumers." I'm not required to use social media and extractive business models. Intenet surveillance is lamentable but I don't see why he thinks app stores are predatory. The PC is still mostly a force for freedom. The privacy losses are more than offset by the gains of communicating with everyone on the planet.
  • 9283409232 2y ago
    > I'm not required to use social media and extractive business models. Most people do use them though. > The privacy losses are more than offset by the gains of communicating with everyone on the planet. I completely disagree. Most people aren't actually communicating. At least not in any form that matters. The drastic increase in loneliness and depression that correlates with the increase in connectivity should at least show that more social media doesn't mean more happy.
    • johnnyanmac 2y ago
      Sadly relatable to a lot of real life. Modern people don't talk "to" each other some portion of the time. They talk past each other in this mimicry of discussion.
  • hn3er1q 2y ago
    That's kinda what I was thinking too. There is a privacy loss for sure, but the average consumer also gained things for that loss. Maybe Amazon in 2000 wasn't so icky but there was also no free same day shipping. Apple II could be repaired without "special tools" but those machines were huge, heavy, mostly empty space, and gap and glass alignment was way worse. I wish I could say something smart about Windows 95 but I've worked hard to erase it from my memory, so I can't. :) Electronics things, just in general, did a lot less in the past. With that comes good and bad. Privacy is a trade-off and right now the general public doesn't place a high value on privacy so they're happy to trade it away for anything. Honestly I understand it. I'm convinced I'm going to get bombarded with marketing nonsense regardless so I might as well get something for it.
• markus_zhang 2y ago
  I actually think going back is a good idea. Throw in an almost free Raspberry Pi Pico, install a 6502-based machine emulator, make it launch at startup and straight away go full screen and you are good to go. I'm thinking about experimenting that with myself and my son when he is older. But he is of the impatient type so maybe this is a bad idea as vintage computers typically need more focus and research. Maybe a DOS emulator then. It has better tools and games.
  • ryandrake 2y ago
    I always thought it would be cool to have a PC that you just turn on and in 200 milliseconds, you're at a Python REPL or something. Like the old Commodore 64 that booted you right to BASIC from ROM. No POST, no beep, no detecting this and initializing that. No fucking splash screen. Just power switch on and BAM, you're at the prompt. According to a Google search, a typical C64 was on in 3 seconds. Maybe I've got rose colored glasses about how long it took, because my recollection was that it was basically instant. Hell, my monitor can't even turn on in 3 seconds. You hit the power button and it gets busy doing... something... who knows what... not turning on, that's for sure.
    • herval 2y ago
      our brains adapt for "better" fast - faster feedback loops, crisper images, higher resolution, etc - and it's really hard to go back. I'd imagine it's something around the reward system of the brain. I grew up with Z80s and CRT monitors, and my brain remembers Enduro as a vivid and fast game. Reality is completely different when you try it out for a second, after having lived in an era of iPhones and 8k displays. It's crazy how uncomfortable even a device from 5 years ago feels...
      • markus_zhang 2y ago
        This is what I'm afraid of. Back then I had the patience to tinker with a 8086 IBM PC (to no avail as my father wanted me to study for IOI which bored me out so he never taught me anything about computer) because it was the new thing and had some games I can play. Nowadays my 4 year old son is already hooked to my in-laws' Tiktok. We are trying to pull him off but unless they leave it's going to be difficult. I don't know what the future lies. I'm fully prepared that my son is going to have zero common interest with me.
• musicale 2y ago
  > How many Nintendo Entertainment System games sustained themselves with in-app purchases and microtransactions? What more did the console ask of you after you bought a cartridge? Maybe to buy another one later if it was fun? True, but unlike the Apple II, the NES was not an open system. The NES had hardware DRM, which allowed Nintendo to control what games were published for the system and to charge licensing fees (much as Nintendo, or Apple, do today). Nintendo also tried (unsuccessfully) to shut down Game Genie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)#10NES https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)#10NES
  • steve_taylor 2y ago
    If you want to cheat in 2025, you buy a bag of virtual coins and spend those coins on boosters, extra turns, etc. If you wanted to cheat in 1992, you'd call the Sega Hotline on a premium phone number and they'd give you cheat codes. It's the same thing, just a different medium and middleman.
    • TapamN 2y ago
      In 1992, you more options. Your friends could tell you for free, you could stumble on them yourself, or you could get them with a magazine or book (which you didn't necessarily have to buy, you could just flip through it at the store and memorize the cheats.)
      • Gormo 2y ago
        Don't forget about dialing into the local BBS and trying to find cheats and tricks in text files.
    • bityard 2y ago
      > you'd call the Sega Hotline on a premium phone number I remember the ads for that but I've never met a single person who did that. (Or whose parents would be okay with it.) Cheat codes were either shared by word of mouth among friends or in magazines. Or you bought a game genie, but that was more for messing around with a game's mechanics than actual, blatant cheating.
• ChrisArchitect 2y ago
  Full title: The PC Is Dead: It's Time to Make Computing Personal Again
• openrisk 2y ago
  Very good summary of all the things that have gone wrong with tech (and this is a long and growing list). The part on how to recover from this unfortunate mess is a bit handwavy though. Not that there are ready made solutions that are being ignored, but if we are going to move beyond conceptual statements it will require some pretty potent medicines that can start fighting the cancer by taking it head on. The enshittification is now in an advanced stage and the billions of addicted masses an enormous inertial weight. Witness e.g., the grotesque politics around the tiktok non-ban. Imho a key ingredient is to ditch the focus on the "personal" and start thinking of "interpersonal computing" (just made that term up). Basically personal computing that is network-first, web-native. The owner-operator is empowered to join the matrix, find their way around without gatekeepers, connect with agency, exchange, filter, process with helpful and transparent algorithms and get on top of the informatiom firehose. Nothing radically new in terms of hardware or software, just rearranged furniture to serve citizens, not some digital oligarchy. The huge success of social media is because it tapped into the immense sociability of our species. Somehow we need to reclaim that trait for the good side of technology, with devices and software that are actually desirable without being leeches that suck society dry.
• Havoc 2y ago
  It does seem technologically possible. Eg IRC, mastodon etc Not convinced the average user cares enough to accept the compromises though and the marketing budgets of big tech is a force to reckon with too
• titzer 2y ago
  This article really resonated with me. Unfortunately I think things aren't going back. What the article doesn't appreciate--and we techies don't either--is just how much the scale of today's tech market absolutely dwarfs the scale of the tech market back in the days before the internet. The market wanted growth. Early tech companies, like Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and then Google, went from zero to huge in a very short period of time. But companies like the FAANGs kept up the absurd levels of growth (20+% YoY growth in the case of Google) that Wall Street got hooked on, and it's been on a drug binge ever since. The result is that we have multiple trillion dollar companies that will...never not want to be a trillion dollar company. The total amount of money in the PC market was miniscule compared to today, and the internet and its online retail plus ads bonanza even dwarfed that. The PC software market, the video games industry, everything--it was all so much smaller. As the internet swallowed the world, it brought billions of users. And those billions of users can only use so many devices and so many games and spreadsheets and stuff. They had to be made into cash cows in other ways. The tech market just has to keep growing. It's stuck tripping forward and must generate revenue somehow to keep the monsters' stomachs fed (and their investors too). We will never be free of their psychotic obsession with monetization. And advertising is soooo insidious. Everything looks like it's free. But it isn't. Because our eyeballs and our mindshare is for sale. And when they buy our eyeballs their making back those dollars of us--it's the whole point. So whether you like it or not, you're being programmed to spend money in other parts of your life that you wouldn't otherwise. It cannot move any direction but falling forward into more consumerism. I'm afraid I'm a doomer in this regard. We're never going back to not being bothered to death by these assholes who want to make money off us 24/7.
  • dangus 2y ago
    I think it's easy to forget that computing technology is a tool. Of course it was bound to be huge today, because it's supposed to be a tool in the toolbox of every company. It wasn't as big back then because not every industry could incorporate it right away, knew how to, or was interested in doing so. It's not bad that it's big. It only needs to grow because the rest of the economy needs to grow. I am also afraid you're a doomer in this regard. You don't think the bigwigs with their fax machines in the 1980s wanted to make money off of us 24/7? Of course they did. Tech is scary in the sense that it's now gone quite a bit beyond the understanding of the average joe. Even most of us on this site probably don't fully understand how much detail data can paint a picture of a person. There are companies that probably know something about me that I don't even know. I guess I don't know how to alleviate that feeling, and maybe it's the correct default assumption to be a doomer. It certainly would be very helpful if the US treated the situation more like the EU treats the situation.
• dangus 2y ago
  While the article has some great points... 1. They are doing a little bit of revisionist history, as the industry was fiercly capitalist and proprietary at that time. 2. This topic really does feel rather beaten to death and I think the target audience is not getting any new information. Speaking specifically about the revisionist history part: > At its core, the PC movement was about a kind of tech liberty—–which I’ll define as the freedom to explore new ideas, control your own creative works, and make mistakes without punishment. Was it? The PC has its roots in IBM, and it became the target product to clone because, since the project was something of a sidenote to IBM's main business, IBM was too cheap/lazy/wahtever to develop proprietary parts. They cobbled together a system that was easy to clone, perhaps entirely by accident. The PC wasn't a universal compatible open standard because of tech liberty, it was a compatible standard because (among other reasons) Microsoft introduced a new OS business model where PC clones fighting each other over low margins benefitted Microsoft. Before Microsoft DOS, each PC was its own moat with its own hardware, its own operating system, and its own proprietary software. Microsoft made everything easy and wonderful as long as you kept using Windows. Apple operated back with the OS/hardware/software moat back then and that's essentially how they continue to operate. They are the only company that survived after that era using that fully proprietary business model and still operates that way. As another commenter pointed out, Nintendo was ruthless about hardware DRM and was a full blown monopoly in their heyday. That's why your parents always call it "Nintendo" instead of "video games," because there was no other vendor anywhere near as successful at that time. Another example of a lack of tech liberty, "Don't Copy that Floppy" was all over the place, a phrase that I've heard injected into Computer Chronicles episodes. Companies were doing all kinds of things to try and prevent you from inspecting, modifying, and copying their software. The Linux kernel didn't exist until 1991, and most UNIX flavors were proprietary. The only reason that era didn't have invasive privacy and data extraction problems is because it wasn't feasible, not because it was an era and movement that had excellent tech liberty. Compare that to today, and it's actually today that's much more of an era of personal computing freedom. I certainly wasn't using an open source web browser, open source IDE, open source server operating system, open source graphics driver, open source PDF editor/viewer, or much other open source software in the 90's. It would have been unthinkable back then to use an open source program to do something like 3D graphics rendering, that would have been reserved for 5-figure Silicon Graphics workstations. And good luck replacing Adobe with something open source. Hosting a major commercial website for a fortune 100 company on an open source operating system? You would be laughed out of town.
• thrdbndndn 2y ago
  The embrace of Apple’s ecosystem shows that many people, especially those in tech, prioritise this aspect less. I just wish people would stop doing mental gymnastics to "justify" their choice—not because I think it’s hypocritical, but because I believe there’s no wrong choice here, only personal preference. If you feel the need to justify your decision, it might be because it doesn’t fully align with your true values.
• apatheticonion 2y ago
  Personally, I feel passionately about being held back from innovating due to legal and corporate anti-competitive barriers. I feel that these artificial barriers contribute to a less competitive environment and increases the problem of e-waste. # The barriers put in place by companies to prevent their hardware from being tinkered with Locked bootloaders and the absence of hardware documentation to base the development of drivers on is an example of this. This prevents the community from taking over when a device reaches end of life or expanding a device to be more useful/open than the company originally intended. Examples of this are: - Apple's M-series Macs/MacBooks. While the hardware is remarkable, Apple's anti-competitive practices manifest in MacOS holding the devices back from their potential. Asahi Linux is an indicator of demand and its success is remarkable given what they are up against. If Apple was compelled to provide reference documentation of their hardware sufficient for driver development then the resulting alternative operating systems introduces competition to an otherwise stagnant market. - Microsoft's Surface laptops and broadly the new X-Elite hardware lineup shares the same criticism as Apple's platform - Mobile phones. Imagine an iPhone running Android. Imagine a Galaxy, Pixel, etc running Linux where Android apps are executed within Waydroid containers? Not going to happen because we are either blocked by bootloaders or blocked by a lack of drivers (deliberately hidden by manufacturers) - Better health trackers. Imagine buying a FitBit, installing an community maintained operating system that has no subscription fees and handles health inference through transparent algorithms that can be contributed to by academics around the world. # No "right to repair" software as it's practically illegal It's virtually illegal to repair software. Decompiling software and fixing it, even if it's end of life, can land you in court. There are so many software projects out there that I would personally love to revive. Think of games like Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Anyway, I've been ranting too much on this topic but you get the idea. I wish governments would grant people protection to tinker/improve hardware AND software and compel corporations to provide sufficient documentation to practically enable that.
• ilaksh 2y ago
  Good rant. The answer is decentralization technologies as much as it is anything else. Open protocols that create holistic but freely evolving systems without a central gatekeeper. That's how you compete with the technopolies. Maybe legislation and culture or something can help also, but it will be most effective if part of that is adopting and spreading the right technology to facilitate those changes.
• ppqqrr 2y ago
  I think people are ready (if not yearning) for a much larger, personal web, built with a different set of incentives. The problem appears to be that the technical class currently lacks the imagination (or more specifically, a kind of epistemological hunger, a craving to deepen the mystery of their craft) to synthesize the new reality of the web with the freedom of the old. I see what the designers are working on, and there's clearly a very large gap of communication between what people want to see in the Web, and what the people in charge of the Web can be bothered to make. I've been working to build a company on my own hoping to fill that gap - I tell the career SWEs in my social circle "I want to give people the true freedom of creating whatever you want on the web," and I just get blank looks, ha :p
  • gyomu 2y ago
    There’s plenty of people with the imagination, skills, and doing their best. If you don’t see them you’re not looking hard enough. The problem is that those people have families to feed and clothe and housing and utilities to pay for and you can’t expect them to work for free (or a pittance) when they’d need to be paid a high 5 figure/low 6 figure salary to be able to afford their basic cost of living. Users broadly don’t want to pay and will turn up their nose at having to spend $50 a year on a service or $10 on an app built by honest people with privacy and respect of the user in mind (when they don’t have any issues blowing hundreds of dollars on much more ridiculous things that don’t respect them as customers, but that’s another story…) And on top of that, how do you make your services known when trillion dollar companies will always beat you in ad spending while offering a free product they have hundreds of people working on? As an example from just a couple days ago, Read.cv just announced they were shutting down and acqui-hired by Perplexity even though they were a lean 3-person team with a monetized product that their users loved. They were at it for 4 years and couldn’t make it work. https://read.cv/a-new-chapter https://read.cv/a-new-chapter > I've been working to build a company on my own Very sincerely: good luck, I hope you succeed in your goals. But just as sincerely, if you truly believe the real problem is that the technological class lacks an “epistemological hunger” and not the basic money/visibility issues I raised above, you’re in for a rude awakening.
    • 2y ago
• banku_brougham 2y ago
  Its really gone all wrong
• brianbest101 2y ago
  [dead]
• makeitdouble 2y ago
  The "make X Y again" meme actually felt fitting. While there are nice ideas in general, too much of it is looking at the past with rose colored glasses. And this makes the argument to go back to these ideals kinda icky. If we really want to do something, we should have a real critical look at why we're here in the first place IMHO, and this isn't it. > For a while—in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s—it felt like nerds were making the world a better place. The nerds (dare I say "we" ?) made the world a different and more connected place, with clear evolutions in regarding finance, productivity and science. Does it make the world a better place ? Did the productivity and finance improvements bring a better and more welcoming society for instance ? It can be argued either way, but that question can't be glossed over as a given IMHO. Then there is no reflection on how computing has become a commodity. It still needs more freedom and control, but these two ideals don't mean the same thing if you're a 30yo single DevOps engineer or a 50yo at home parent watching over 5 kids. Both need computing, but the purpose and intricate needs are completely different. Focusing only on one because it's easier kinda misses the point IMHO (and we're back to the role of technology and how exactly it makes the world better)
• simonh 2y ago
  Things change. Some for the better, others for the worse, but not all these changes are bad and some are inevitable, and it's not s if the past was all roses anyway. What is a coin in an arcade videogame if it's not a microtransaction? Software as a service is just different, and it's not all bad. You have automated upgrades, a consistently funded developer that can better plan and deliver updates, if you only need the software for a short period of time it can be cheaper. Frankly the packaged software approach was a kludge due to the technical limitations of the time. Now if big releases make sense developers do that, if incremental updates over time provided as a service make sense, they can do that. Most of the section on what we can do about all this is focused on stuff that didn't exist in the past. The internet and online services, social media. Going back to the past wouldn't be to do those in some ideal way that used to exist, it would mean not doing them at all. Sure. There is no ideal past to go back to without pulling the online plug. However, that plug isn't going away, and we don't actually want it to. The "How we can reclaim control" bit at the end is mostly correct, but it's really about coming to grips with managing the new reality, not going back to a situation we've outgrown.
  • pjmlp 2y ago
    On my days those microtransactions were 20 escudos, 25 escudos, 50 escudos, 50 euros (great deal with this one, 1 euro == 200.482 escudos), 1 euro, eventually arcades died after this.
• wkat4242 2y ago
  Yeah people often say "you love things that are invented before you're 35, and you hate the things after that". But do young people really love this hyper-commercial internet these days? All the subscription services? The empty social media content? I do see what they mean a bit because I'm pretty sceptical of AI, though I did set up my own server to experiment with it in a way where my stuff doesn't end up in the cloud.
  • Karrot_Kream 2y ago
    Young people use social media as time-wasters, self-promotion avenues, or ways to boost their business and use group chats to do most of their actual communications. Techies really love to get angry about social networks but the reality is younger folks know how to treat social media the same way older people know to take random internet comments with a grain of salt. The techie web isn't coming back and wishing it so won't do so. You can always just drop into an IRC network or Mastodon server with other nerds, but the days that everyone on the web was a techie nerd with general-purpose computing interests is long gone.
    • wkat4242 2y ago
      Well I don't really get angry about socials. Just don't use them. > The techie web isn't coming back and wishing it so won't do so. You can always just drop into an IRC network or Mastodon server with other nerds, but the days that everyone on the web was a techie nerd with general-purpose computing interests is long gone. Well in that way it's still there. It lives on here on HN and the other places you mention. Probably as big as it was in those days. I don't think it's really gone. Just the internet grew around it with all the commercial BS and big tech companies viewing users as products. Also, us techies manage to avoid the worst of that with adblockers, pay wall blockers, pirate video downloads, self hosted services etc. I probably see only a handful of ads every day. Even my phone blocks most of them. I also have custom scripts for the sites I frequent the most to make them more info dense like hacker news (and remove most of the big photos)
      • Karrot_Kream 2y ago
• mmackh 2y ago
  We’ve been working on a new kind of home computer for a few years now based around microcontrollers. Unlike a traditional setup, it’s aimed at replacing the traditional light switch to provide environmental awareness and bring families closer together. Although the base OS is not open source, the SDK is totally scriptable, meaning as an owner you will be able to trace and understand the device fully. Examples of what it can do - Autonomous lighting with mmWave radar with 180 degrees fov and ambient light sensor - Recording of temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and VOX to onboard SQLite database at a chosen interval. - Onboard web server, which serves as dashboard and configuration page. - Communication platform with integrated microphone (hardware indicator light, off by default) and speakers. I’m also experimenting with talking to LLMs like this. And many more things. If you’d like to reach us hello [at] sentionic.com
  • rkagerer 2y ago
    All this is in a light switch?
    • mmackh 2y ago
      Yes. The thinking was: displays are all around you already. Why not build an ambient computing platform. If it replaces infrastructure in your home it needs to provide enough value. I think we’ve covered that now, but it’s taken a few years.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  • nakedneuron 2y ago
    Had to parse two times.. wasn't sure if satire...
• jwr 2y ago
  This article made me even more sad than I already was. I've just been reading about Bambu Lab (a leading 3d printer manufacturer, who introduced really good 3d printers a couple of years ago and really shook up the entire market) self-destructing itself and burning through all the goodwill accumulated over the years. They are working on closing down access to their printers, apparently with the end goal of locked-down subscription-based access. This is much like the path that HP followed with their printers. I also write this on a Mac, where I'm watching with sadness the formerly great company being run by bean-counters, who worry about profits, not user experience. The Mac is being progressively locked down and many things break in the process. Yes, it is still better than Windows, where apparently the start menu is just advertising space and the desktop isn't mine, but Microsoft's, but the path is definitely sloping down. It's just sad. I don't know what else to write. There isn't much we can do, as long as everybody tolerates this.
  • markus_zhang 2y ago
    I have the same fear as you do. My prediction, is that, in the not too far future, perhaps 20-25 years, with the "blessing" of national security, ads business and other big players, devices will be further locked down and tracked, INCLUDING personal computers. A lot of people already don't own a computer nowadays, except for the pocket one. In that future PCs, if they still exist, perhaps are either thin clients connecting to the vast National Net, where you can purchase subscriptions for entertainment, or completely locked down pads that ordinary people do not even have the tool to open properly. Oh, all "enhanced" with AI agents of course. You might even get a free one every 5 years -- part of your basic income package. They won't make learning low level programming or hardware hacking illegal, because they are still valuable skills, and some people need to do that anyway. But for ordinary people it's going to be a LOT tougher. The official development languages of your computer system are some sort of Java and Javascript variants that are SAFE. You simply don't get exposed to the lower level. Very little system level API is going to be exposed because you won't have to know. If you have some issues, submit a ticket to the companies who program the systems. We are already halfway there. Politicians and super riches are going to love that.
    • 2y ago
• brandon272 2y ago
  I love the "which part of.." examples of companies and services that the author lists, along with the screenshots. I know that nostalgic feelings tend to not be an accurate representation of the past, but I do know that I used to look at a lot of those companies and products with some admiration. No, things were not perfect back then, but a lot of these products had a level of innocence, goodwill or benevolence that does not exist today. They seemed more rooted in innovation than value extraction at all costs. Today, I look at those same companies with absolute derision over their completely unethical and hostile approaches to the world, the economy and dealing with the people that use or rely on them. Worse, my ability to get excited about new companies, products, services and innovations has been completely blunted by the expectation that anyone working on something I think is "cool" will inevitably be co-opted by people who have the worst instincts: those who actually have no respect for technology or computing and view people as less than human, simply entities from which maximum value must be extracted at any cost.
  • interludead 2y ago
    Maybe we should reconciling the best of the past with the benefits of today...
    • BrenBarn 2y ago
      How?
• demizer 2y ago
  A web browser that has all the shit the big tech companies added to make it hard to create a good web browser would be a good start. A web browser does not need webgl or wasm. I want to log into my bank to see how much money I have.
  • userbinator 2y ago
    I want to log into my bank to see how much money I have. The most infuriating part is that this is perfectly doable with 90s web technology. Even encryption was already available in the form of SSL, and that's arguably the only thing which has improved since then. The majority of technological "progress" has merely been the reinvention of existing technology in more inefficient ways.
    • pjmlp 2y ago
      In the 90's many banks would make you install a variant of Java applet, ActiveX or Flash, to log into their systems. In the name of a "better experience". I know, because that is exactly what many of our customers did on the agency I worked during those days.
      • nayuki 2y ago
        I was too young to have a bank account back then. However, I can personally attest that the Toronto Public Library, around year 2000+/-2, had a Java applet on their public website which the general public used to search the library's catalog. I may or may not have saved a snapshot of one of those JAR files. Needless to say, the Java applet was awkward compared to a properly designed web application - e.g. loading screens, weird widgets that were neither web nor Windows, inability to select text by default, inability to use the web browser's UI controls (e.g. back/forward/reload/URL-bar).
  • aitchnyu 2y ago
    I work for a solar CAD+CRUD app that runs in browser. WebGL is more than fun stuff. Wasm is becoming The Way to run applications in a portable way in servers.
• bruce511 2y ago
  I expect these comments to be full of agreement. Corporate behavior in the computer space leaves much to he desired. I will however observe; None of the supplied examples showed any form of network effect. It was all stuff you did at home. Today, there are certainly options for personal computing for most everything- as long as network effects are not in play. Those options may not be as convenient, as cheap, or as feature-rich as the invasive option. That's fair though - you decide what you want to prioritize. Network effects are harder to deal with. To the extent that in order to be in community you need to adopt the software the community has chosen. Not surprisingly, software producers that can build-in network effects, do so. It's excellent from a lock-in point of view. The title of the article is perhaps then ironic. It's trivial to make computing personal. All the tools to do so already exist. The issue is not Personal Computing. It's Community Computing.
  • RachelF 2y ago
    Recently there's been another shift - processing power. In the past you could do almost anything on a personal computer, it was generally about as fast as mainframe or high end workstation. Training large AI models is currently impossible for most home users. They just do not have the processing power.
    • shwouchk 2y ago
      That’s not true in many domains where doing it on a personal computer would be either too long or too long in asfar as you are are skillful as using faster memory as cache. video production, climate simulations, pdes, protein folding, etc etc
      • dsign 2y ago
        I agree with you; all of those needed vastly more computing than was available in a PC. If anything, the power of modern hardware has made a lot of it more available in personal workstations. Though it is true that hyped-for-the-masses personal computing devices are not optimized in that direction. You get what you buy.
• talles 2y ago
  I 100% want the shift towards this as probably everyone in this comment section right here. But how do we sell to the layman that he is missing something, which he never experienced in the first place? Sadly, I believe we are doomed to be niche.
• drewcoo 2y ago
  That is not in any way what personal computer meant. We may as well follow Steve Martin and get small again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Na0M-Ixm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Na0M-Ixm8
• 65 2y ago
  As long as big tech keeps shoving AI down our throats, it only gets worse.
• photochemsyn 2y ago
  The political approach in the article might help a bit in forcing some design changes across the hardware and software industries: > "We need comprehensive privacy legislation in the United States that enshrines individual privacy as a fundamental right. We need Right to Repair legislation that puts control of our devices back into our hands—and also DRM reform, especially repealing Section 1201 of the DMCA so we can control the goods we own and historians can preserve our cultural heritage without the need for piracy." Laws alone won't be enough - there's a need for new design approaches for production devices and systems. For each of the above: -Expanding high-speed internet to all regions of the country is a positive, but privacy is limited because metadata is visible, and if we assume all nations are tapping into the trunk of the internet and collecting everything that transits their systems, this means strong encryption should be the concept around which all communication systems are built, so that at least the content of the messages can't be read. -Right-to-Repair should extend to device design goals in which maintenance and replacement of components is intended and user alterations and upgrades aren't actively blocked. Batteries should be relatively easy to replace, etc. -For cultural history preservation, allow archivists to bypass DRM and store offline backups of materials. Also make it easy to become an archivist and build communities of archivists.
• TulliusCicero 2y ago
  > For example, which part of the Apple II was predatory? How about the price? A quick googling suggests that it cost ~6,500 USD (in today's money) to buy an Apple II when it launched. Obviously it was a different time, but that sort of price today would likely be called predatory by at least some people.
• DidYaWipe 2y ago
  I admit that I did not RTFA, but for a while I've been thinking that with the ascendancy of dumbed-down, peck-to-get-your-reward touchscreen devices... computers are returning to the domain of computing enthusiasts. I remember taking my Atari 400 on family vacations, reading Compute magazine by the pool and learning a shitload about programming just by reading. Oh and yes, I did ride my bike and have friends and play baseball and go to the beach. Computers were just another fun thing to do. And eventually I put what I learned to use at Apple and several other big-name companies. Today, the dominant platform (Windows) is an execrable, intolerable shitshow of anti-user arrogance and aggression and abuse. Apple's platforms are better, but I have little confidence in how long that'll last. In the end, I guess we're going back to "nerds" using real computers running Linux, and pigeons pecking at big colored buttons on touchscreens to get their reward pellets.
• shrubble 2y ago
  I have taken a further step back and started using an electric typewriter for my thoughts and ideas. It’s been good for me since I can’t switch away to another task without having to stand up and go to my other desk. I have written more down in the last month than I have in the past two years.
• nfw2 2y ago
  1. Basically all the examples given in the article are of tech that is better now: - Nintendo Switch games don't have microtransactions now - VHS are unplayable now because people no longer have the machines. You can still buy anything on Blu-ray and own it forever but most people prefer the convenience of not needing a machine and disc collection. - On Amazon now, nearly literally anything you could find in a box store is available, and you can have most of it in 1 day. Just buy from reputable brands or Amazon itself and you will be fine. - There are so many benefits of a smartphone -- maps, internet browser for emergencies, music streaming, audiobooks, 2-factor. Flip phones are still around but no one uses them - Google search is barely even needed now because of chatgpt, which also doesn't have ads and seo trash - Ubuntu is better than Microsoft 95 and doesn't track you - Social media is worse now, I'll concede here. 2. The article seemingly champions personal liberty and then has a section titled "How we can reclaim control". How about we let consumers decide what they want? If you don't like microtransactions don't buy games with microtransactions, eg. 3. It's ironic that the community run by the premier tech vc seems so against capitalism.
  • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
    >> Ubuntu is better than Microsoft 95 Wow, incredible progress in just 30 years!
    • nfw2 2y ago
      the argument being made by the article is that microsoft 95 was better than operating systems now operating systems aren't where most innovation happens, obviously, nor should they be, but they have made progress in usability, security, performance, etc. technology has certainly made incredible progress in 30 years cynicism and denigrating everything is easy but it stops being cool after about age 16
      • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
        Not everything. Selectively. Win95 was a marvel of tech at its time. Ubuntu and other linux desktop attempts are in a sorry and shameful state.
• ashoeafoot 2y ago
  A depent system is a stable system . If the population has diabetes, it can not riot. If the computing can not be done without a network , you can not plot any systemic change revolution. One must stop seeing things from a technical tradeoff perspective and start perceiving them from a political stable due to hostages perspective. The arguments make sense because they must.
• movedx 2y ago
  If we wanted to replicate the 90s, 00s, and even the 2010s era gaming experience - mostly single player, no micro-transactions, and so on - how do we do that today? Is there way to discover games that aren't trying to extract as much money from you as possible?
  • BrenBarn 2y ago
    There are actually a fair number of indie games like that. Of course, a lot of them are only available via something like Steam, which is a networked platform that has some dubious aspects. GOG is somewhat better (e.g., you can download offline installers that are supposed to be self-contained and work even if GOG disappears). The harder part is finding out which such games are good. The best way I've found is finding communities of people who play them and recommend them to one another. Of course, those communities nowadays are often on a platform like Reddit or Discord which are themselves in the process of or ripe for enshittification. But for the games themselves, it's possible.
  • erremerre 2y ago
    Buy a second hand ps3, hack it. That is the easiest way.
• BrenBarn 2y ago
  It's a nice article, but like so many I feel like it has a reluctance to address some of the issues head-on. Like this: > I’m not calling the tech industry evil. Well. . . why not? I think at this point the tech industry is evil. Not in the sense that water is wet, and maybe not even in the sense that mammals birth live young, but sort of in the sense that ice occurs near the Earth's poles. There are some bits and pieces here and there that don't follow the pattern but they are the exception and they're getting smaller. That doesn't mean that technology is evil, but the ways its being used and developed often are. And that gets to another aspect of this that I feel like people in the tech world sometimes overlook when talking about this: enshittification is not a technological phenomenon. It's a social phenomenon that is driven by our socio-legal apparatus which allows and encourages high-risk pursuit of sky-high profits. Corporate raiding a la the Sears debacle, consolidation in grocery stores, even something like tobacco/health or oil/climate-change coverups, all these are forms of enshittification. Tech is the most prominent venue, maybe because it's especially suited to certain forms of vendor lock, but it's by no means the only one. Enshittification happens because we are not willing to take a sledgehammer to the idea that making businesses bigger and bigger is a good thing. Timid reforms focused on things like data privacy are woefully inadequate. Large companies need to be directly dismantled, wealth needs to be directly deconcentrated, and broad swaths of behavior that are currently happening left and right need to become the kind of thing that will land you in prison for 10 years. I'm not optimistic this is going to happen without some kind of "hitting bottom", though, whatever form that may take.
  • amilios 2y ago
    Maybe I'm too cynical, but too many people in power directly benefit fom enshittification for anything about it to change. Even just the problem of fixing the housing market while the majority of politicians own several properties is an example of this. There's zero incentive for anything to change.
    • BrenBarn 2y ago
      I'm cynical enough to basically agree. :-) I do think it may change, but that's what I mean about hitting bottom. It may have to get so bad that there is some kind of violent uprising or societal collapse/fracturing. Just by the by, ironically, I've heard, from my tenuous connections into ideological spheres outside my own, that a decent number of people voted for Trump out of a similar desire to shake the foundations of the system. Of course they've likely been hoodwinked, but I think the opportunity is there for a Bernie Sanders-esque person on the other side to make some change by whipping up a frenzy of rage at the status quo and promising to get out the pitchforks. The question is whether such a frenzy can be accompanied by enough cool-headed calculation to be effective.
• interludead 2y ago
  > Every generation looks back and says, “Things used to be better,” whether they are accurate or not. Yep, earlier eras of computing were characterized by more user control, less surveillance and fewer predatory business models. Yet it’s important not to overlook the progress we’ve made. Modern tech is vastly more powerful, accessible, and interconnected than what came before. And in a case of a tech world nostalgia should inspire action for improvement
• 8bitsrule 2y ago
  This is such a right write on the subject that it's already a classic manifesto.
  • benjedwards 2y ago
    Thank you, glad you enjoyed it.
• sharpshadow 2y ago
  It reads a bit romantic leaving out geopolitical interests and seeing money as the solely motivator.
  • ozornin 2y ago
    Sounds potentially interesting, but I don't get the point yet. Could you elaborate please?
    • h3half 2y ago
      Not who you replied to, but one view might be something along the lines of "We can't break up these American tech monopolies because at least they're American. If we break up these companies European or - worse! - Chinese or Russian companies will use their outsized scale to simply replace the American companies we kneecapped and now we're worse off". That is, some people might see it as a lesser of two evils situation where you're choosing the domestic monopolist rather than the foreign one. I think there are certain worldviews where this is worth enough to sacrifice privacy, competition, etc.
• thom 2y ago
  People who lament the economics of modern computing never got a £300 phone bill for a month of nothing but IRC and Usenet.
• ozornin 2y ago
  For me, this was the most touching part. The rest I mostly agree with, but have thought or read many times before. > And there’s another problem. Very soon, we might be threatening the continuity of history itself with technologies that pollute the historical record with AI-generated noise. It sounds dramatic, but that could eventually undermine the shared cultural bonds that hold cultural groups together. > That’s important because history is what makes this type of criticism possible. History is how we know if we’re being abused because we can rely on written records of people who came before (even 15 minutes ago) and make comparisons. If technology takes history away from us, there may be no hope of recovery.
  • dayjaby 2y ago
    History is written by the winner. So I would not say that historical records themselves have a value, but historical studies overall including archaeology, cross-checking multiple scripts from different sources. So noise has always been there as well as methods do deal with noise.
• fedeb95 2y ago
  there's only two things that can change how companies operate: stop buying their products or services. Another, keep informing people about what they're actually buying, since companies like to keep that hidden. Until a lot of people start questioning their habits as consumers, companies won't change.
• dusted 2y ago
  Convenience kills. I think every sane individual in the world knows the article speaks the truth, and I think everyone wants this to happen. But corporations are not individuals, corps are their own life-form, and even though humans make up the corp, the corp is not human, it is not even inhumane, it is a whole different thing, and the humans that operate it has very little influence on it. So, as far as a corp can understand anything, it can't understand this human article. I don't know if one can write articles that a corp can understand, maybe it cannot understand medium in the same way we can.. It seems to act based on information it sees in "markets" and "consumer behaviour", and we don't yet know how to write an article with those (even if "vote with your money" was once believed to be it, until we discovered that mankind as a whole is not an individual that can make a decision)
  • renatovico 2y ago
    No, the humans in direction has the responsible per actions that inhumane made, if you think because you can not change the current corp rule and agree with did a imoral thing well sorry but you is the problem, if you do not want made anything imoral, ilegal or anything you need resigned immediately and think what you want, corporation have accountability in person if you remove this you remove the responsibility and the consequences well the world need understand consequences of choice
    • dusted 2y ago
      So far, your view (that the individuals making up the corp can significantly influence its behaviour) has been the approach the world has taken so far, and yet, corps are not exactly getting more well behaved. Please reconsider whether continuing to do the same (simple and easy) thing we've always done, that we've already seen does not work. Take a step back, re-evaluate the problem in a new context, even if you don't end up agreeing with my perspective, attempting to think about the situation in a new light might be helpful. It might be that something in the way corps grow up, maybe their environment (regulations, lack of same, incentives, consumerism, trade, markets) may influence them to grow into the immoral unethical monsters they often become. Maybe we should consider them too dangerous and harmful, and simply destroy them, I'm not convinced that's better, but maybe there's a way to understand them at a different level, that allows us to "write articles" they understand well enough to actually adjust their behavior (and not just try and circumvent whatever "obstacle" has been put in their path).
• dominicrose 2y ago
  We have to be cautious about the attention-grabbing stuff that's everywhere now, but we're only human and easily tempted. This is bad for unsupervised children/teens. Even young adults can be pretty immature now. When I go out for a walk in the forest, I see maybe one or two people walking a dog. Where is the rest of humanity? Watching TV, playing a mobile game, whatever...
• GardenLetter27 2y ago
  I agree with the article but it's a shame it just ends with some call for legislation. The government is not going to save you. If you want that better future, you need to build it. Look at the Steam Deck for example that goes against the grain on all these matters (right to repair, mostly FOSS, unrestricted, etc.) and it's been a huge success. We need a mobile platform like PinePhone / Librem to have the same level of success and reliability.
  • rnoorda 2y ago
    The Steam Deck is a great example, and I attribute its success to riding that line between usability and customization. I can get into Linux and mess around, or I can never touch the back-end stuff and just play my games.
  • pjmlp 2y ago
    SteamDeck would be a great example if they pushed for GNU/Linux gaming, as it is, it remains to be seen for how long Microsoft will tolerate Proton, and in what way they will respond.
  • scottLobster 2y ago
    How is building the thing going to save us? Once you prove the market some FAANG with infinite pockets will buy you out or make a better, cheaper version that seamlessly integrates with their ecosystem (that their customers rely on, rightfully or wrongfully) and destroy you. The Steam Deck is cool, but it's not a success because of its repairability or hackability. Valve is just a rare example of a privately owned corporation with enough profit to indulge in such things. Need I remind you Steam earned said profit by essentially denying you complete ownership of video games you purchase? What we have is a problem of incentives, and the government is the only power that can alter those at scale. The only reason the Fortune 500 don't sponsor televised gladiatorial bloodsport is that it's illegal, which means the government will send guys with guns to stop it and arrest those responsible if/when it occurs. The government is "saving" us from that, just as it "saves" us from having chalk in our flour and lead in our water.
• jgord 2y ago
  I keep telling VCs and Angel investors that now is the time to look for relatively under-valued high growth startups using Reinforcement Learning to solve real world B2B / engineering / logistics problems ... The balanced NPU/GPU/CPU with close cache ram, such as the recent Lunar Lake chip, coupled with better integrated GPUs in consumer class laptops, and a nice web GPU webgl api .. make for a lot of capability for problems that are well solved by Monte Carlo simulation ... and RL generally. 3D apps are now really doable in browser on current devices... and the browser is a great delivery device for applications, avoiding platform specific installs and dependency hell.
• ksec 2y ago
  I guess I am in the minority and being contrarian again. I don't have a problem with lock down, repair etc. At least not with the current iteration of computing. While they are bad, these lock down means less competitions. And having less competition means less choices, etc, all of that leads to my final point which in my view is perhaps the most important, these company create crap products, software and services. If they had continue to innovate and push I would have less of a problem. Look at Microsoft, and now to a less extend Apple as well. In the pursuit of more revenue they now make crap. Therefore the more personal computing in my view isn't the benefits listed. It is to keep the company itself honest. To make them aware they need to innovate. To give a damn, to make something better.
• bjornnn 2y ago
  These kinds of articles pop up all the time, along with all the "Web 3" ideas, and all of them seem to view the past with a sort of rose-tinted nostalgia, forgetting that the corporate business world of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s was just as sleazy and run by assholes as it is today; the only difference is that the technology is finally catching up with the ambitions of said sleazy assholes and allowing them to do what they've been trying to do since the outset, i.e. grow into enormous ungovernable conglomerates and wield godlike omnipotent control over the flow of information. As a matter of fact, this stink of sleaziness that permeated the early Web was so prominent and overpowering that it played a key role in the rise of these huge companies like Google. Google's algorithms and page crawlers were not that revolutionary or different from anything the other search engines were doing; Google just happened to be in a position where they were sitting on lots of cash and were able to run a search engine for several years with no ads or clutter or any of the other annoyances of its competitors, seemingly providing a free service that asks nothing in return. They made this part of their carefully curated public image, of being the hip and cool tech company with the "don't be evil" mantra. They probably burned through ungodly amounts of money doing things this way, but once all the competing search engines withered away and died and Google had the entire market cornered they grew into a multi-trillion dollar megacorporation and are now unstoppable and now all their services they provide are deteriorating because they have no competition. Ironically, it was this false underdog narrative, the idea of the young trendy cool tech companies overthrowing the stuffy old corporate tech companies, that sort of paved the way for the tech industry to become more monopolized and horrible than ever. And now it's happening again with lots of "Web3" companies trying to present themselves as the new champions, who will overthrow the stuffy old corporate tech companies like Google and bring us into a new era of the Web that is even worse than this one.
  • gizmo 2y ago
    > Google's algorithms and page crawlers were not that revolutionary or different from anything the other search engines were doing; Google was revolutionary when it launched. It was clean, super fast, and had way superior search results. It blew the competition away. Within weeks of Google's launch techies started scolding people for using AltaVista or Yahoo, when they should be using something better.
• bulatb 2y ago
  When someone can't accept that other people value different things than they do, and that person also has uncommon values, they will spend a lot of time upset that everyone is wrong. They'll look for something that explains why everyone is choosing to be stupid and evil, and they'll try to find that comfort in the worldview that made them upset in the first place, retreating ever further from the chance to get real answers. When people with that kind of worldview roll their eyes at empathy, or scoff at any need to see beyond their own opinions[0], they are all but guaranteed to seal themselves inside. FOSS, decentralized, et al. attract a lot of people with those worldviews, and that story is the story of them failing with consumers over and over and over, doubling down on what failed every time. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29114882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29114882
  • andrewstuart 2y ago
    Witness mastodon, which got the biggest free shot at goal ever but utterly failed because it was unusable by ordinary people. Yeah sure BlueSky uses Mastodon and it’s more successful but that’s because it’s BlueSky which is not mastodon.
• fancyfredbot 2y ago
  In the 90s I had no DRM or walled garden OS, and I couldn't stream movies or do online banking from my phone. In the 2020s I can do both of those things from walled garden OSs with DRM. The option to use an offline OS is still here too, although I can't do those things with it. That's a step forward?
• jsx2 2y ago
  There are three reasons why this happens. The first is described perfectly by bjornn: > <...> corporate business world of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s was just as sleazy and run by assholes as it is today; the only difference is that the technology is finally catching up with the ambitions of said sleazy assholes and allowing them to do what they've been trying to do since the outset, <...> Second, computers are cheap now. They are no longer for the financial and/or intellectual elite. Third, there is an overall culture/intellecual/value decline in the Western world. Probably because life after the Cold War was too easy. Now many(?) young people, at least in America, can't write by hand, and men who cut their genitals are not considered to be in need of very serious therapy, and Harvard students support HAMAS, and so on.
• 867-5309 2y ago
  in the spirit of MAGA: MCPA, or, with a little yodafication: CAMP
• mattlutze 2y ago
  > At its core, the PC movement was about a kind of tech liberty—–which I’ll define as the freedom to explore new ideas, control your own creative works, and make mistakes without punishment. The PC movement of the 90s, where it feels like this author is reminiscing, was about arbitraging the delta between what the tech could do and the literacy and expertise in government. > But over the past decade in particular, the Internet and digital rights management (DRM) have been steadily pulling that control away from us and putting it into the hands of huge corporations. This period of computing was notable for how a bunch of nerds figured out how to use new networking technology to stretch/abuse/violate/break copyright and fair-use laws around media. So many ways to get ripped content then. It was fun for a teenager and felt like a victimless loophole. It both opened a bloom of interesting new creative works, but also decimating existing markets and systems, so that eventually new monopolists Netflix and Spotify could take over. But the conditions and tools available then never went away, and private personal computing is more available today than ever before. In a few hours someone can read a few tutorials and buy/build and run a whole redudant content serving service for all of their personal needs, while writing or conglomerating a whole system of tools and capabilities to automate or agument nearly anything they could think of.
• Red_Comet_88 2y ago
  This crapification of tech is just a microcosm of where America is headed as a whole. I found a blog recently that talks about it in depth, and I find it hard to argue with any of the analysis or conclusions [1]. Hard to ignore the signs that the US is an empire in decline, heading towards collapse. 1. https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjun24/negativity6-24.html https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjun24/negativity6-24.html
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• MichaelRo 2y ago
  It's very easy to make computing personal: unplug it from the Internet. Unfortunately, the options are much more limited and very soon you discover, boring.
• JimmyWilliams1 2y ago
  [dead]
• ozim 2y ago
  For a while—in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s—it felt like nerds were making the world a better place. Now, it feels like the most successful tech companies are making it worse. Don’t forget Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos were nerds - don’t blame everything on „corporations”. That is also nerds after they got ahold of influence and money - that is how the story ends.
• HenryBemis 2y ago
  PC is not dead. PC is killed. Just as your iPhone or Android sends GB of data back and forth without your knowledge or approval, our dear friends in Microsoft want a piece of that pie. Most people are already consumed by the 'machine'. Those who resist will stick to Win10 as much as possible (I got a 2014 laptop that runs Win10Pro and runs perfectly) and my gaming desktop doesn't need an upgrade for another 10 years. All we need is selective updates, run privacy/blocking tools, change our hosts file, run a firewall (WindowsFirewallControl) on MediumFiltering, etc. Unfortunately only few can do such fine-tuning to their PCs (a few thousand people in the 8bn people). The rest will be consumed by the 'machine'. I've mentioned on another topic/comment. We are cattle. We push back very rarely and on very few topics. I am a Gibson-kinda-guy. Take the $200. Give me the OS. Stay away.
• BirAdam 2y ago
  The web as an app platform form was primarily pushed by Netscape to circumvent Microsoft’s monopoly. Sun tried the same with Java. Both of these efforts led directly to every problem the author is complaining about. There was no utopia. The world went from an expensive monopoly under IBM to an expensive monopoly under WinTel to an expensive duopoly under Microsoft and Apple. If people dislike exploitative SaaS and content platforms, stop using them. No one is forcing anyone. Plenty of people use home servers and Linux. Go for it. There are also tools like Chris Titus’s UWU to make Windows more tolerable, and MS still sells an office suite that can be installed locally. You don’t even have to “sign in” with it, though you can. I’ve lived through several distinct eras of computing. This one may not be the most exciting, but it’s by far the best. You can use SaaS or locally installed stuff, and emulators (both hardware and software) exist to keep the older stuff alive. Even better, I don’t have to panic save every 5 seconds, reboot my computer every hour, and my computer can come with me. I don’t get disconnected when someone places a call, and while some software is expensive, it’s cheaper than it used to be when inflation adjusted. Go fire up an Apple II, an H89, a TRS-80, or a PET without any modern supplementation and tell me that those are preferable. You may groan about Google, but go back to purchasing tons of manuals that may or may not be specific to your machine, read through them only to find no answer and proceed to play detective for a few weeks. How much more productive is your time with a dang search engine?
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• keybored 2y ago
  You get what you ask for. The Californian Ideology is either pro-corporate or corporate-naive. Either technology itself is deterministically going to democratize things (like the Internet was an auto-democratic force, they thought—or now AI is going to help liberate everyone, hah) and/or you just don’t need to worry about private interests. But private (corporate) interests didn’t just come out of nowhere. The Internet was created by the US state (federal) sector and then handed over for commercialization around the Clinton era. Should anyone be surprised about the turn of events? Now the author, just as naive as the rest, talks about reigning in corprorate interests by enacting laws. And who is gonna make the politicians do that? The rich control the government. Many of them are the tech-rich. Biden said in his farewell address that he was worried about a rising Tech Robber Baron era. Yikes. Someone should have done something about that. Like the departing president, perhaps?[1] All of this was mainly done by the rich. Not by nerds (because not all nerds are rich). But the less wealthy California nerds who bought into the Californian Ideology helped it along. [1] It’s not that he did nothing. It’s that he did a half-spirited job of it. If he really meant and was motivated by his own words he would have done more.
• wolvesechoes 2y ago
  We are loosing personal computing, because most communities in FOSS and related movements are too much into individualism. Comments in this thread are clearly showing that. Human emancipation always required mass political movement, and such movement requires some sense of common purpose and solidarity - to sacrifice some of our individuality. If they lost that, they lost their cause. Society cannot be changed without changes in policy, and changes in policy require political power to enact them. You do not gain this kind of power through constant forking, dramas, and even gazillion lines of code using AGPL license. Nobody fears a toothless dog.
  • fluoridation 2y ago
    I'm completely lost on what your point is. What are you saying people should do, and to accomplish what?
• samsquire 2y ago
  where can I go to see the awesome things you're working on in your home personal computing? I like the GitHub collected archives of "awesome" that is lists of things that persons have created or done https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome